


The Croft

by AsbestosMouth



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, An angsty romantic ghost story for Halloween, Angst, F/M, Flashbacks, Ghosts, Ramsay is his own warning, Romantic Angst, Supernatural Elements, What is Dead May Never Die, When I say major character death I really mean it, i'm so sorry please don't hurt me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-18
Updated: 2016-10-18
Packaged: 2018-08-23 03:15:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8311903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AsbestosMouth/pseuds/AsbestosMouth
Summary: The Last Croft sits at the mouth of the Weeping Water, and has done for over a thousand years. When Sandor and Sansa leave the rat race of King's Landing and escape to the North, everything seems wonderful. At first. But when phones move mysteriously, and writing materialises upon the bathroom mirror, Sansa realises that they may not be alone in their perfect idyll after all. The North, so strange and so removed from the rest of the Seven Kingdoms, always suggested a realm beyond the human, the mundane. Sansa just never believed that. Until now.An angsty/romantic/bittersweet supernatural-themed Hallowe'en fic that lives up to the tags. I'm so sorry.





	

* * *

 

 

The house is nothing that Sansa ever expected; more, and less, and wonderful, and fascinating in turn.

 

Squat. Heavy stone that reminds her of Winterfell, though lying far to the west, near the ruin of the Dreadfort. According to the literature that she absorbed and can now recite at length, the crofthouse is a jewel of Northern architecture, dating back centuries to before the War of the Five Kings. Unlike the ugly and menacing Dreadfort, some properties are still wholly owned by the Boltons, who subsidise their income through tenancies and rentals. Some of the smaller cottages and barns have slowly fallen to ruin, or ended up colonised by that particular breed of Northern farmer who relies on subsistence existence and scraping a living from the poor soil. Some are rented by those wanting to get away from everything, like Sansa and Sandor.

 

The walls need whitewashing, and several slates are cracked, but as she scrambles from the pick-up that Sandor insists he needs now they’re going to live in the wilderness, she feels a strange sense of belonging.

 

Steep hills meander purposefully to the sea, kissing surprisingly pale sand. On a day like this, where the sky is a milky blue and reflected in the water, and the waves are mere mill pond ripples, and the seabirds wheel and the sheep bleat softly, there is nothing but idyll. Sure, they drove down their own private drive which is little more than a mile and a half of badly gravelled dirt track, and the winter will be particularly harsh when it hits, but it’s hers. Hers and Sandor’s first proper home together, outside of the bustle of King’s Landing. The croft is large enough for Sansa’s burgeoning hand-painted yarn business that is in huge demand by high-fashion designers and knitwear artists. Sandor has enough room to get a horse, and farm a few animals; ever since his time on the Quiet Isle working with the monks, he’s hankered for a patch of land and hard physical labour.

 

Cat hates the place. Says it is too far away from anywhere, and what happens when Sansa gets pregnant, and how are they going to get groceries when it snows, and really, a house with rent that cheap? There must be something wrong.

 

Rickon, obviously, adores it. Made Sandor promise he can come and help during the long holidays between his university years. He’s threatening to bring Shireen, which Sansa doesn’t mind, because her mathematics ability is fantastic for helping with the more technical side of the yarn-dying and spinning.

 

“Here we are, then, girl.” Sandor still calls her that, even though Sansa is a few years off thirty.

 

“It’s beautiful. Listen to the skylarks!”

 

“Sound almost as pretty as you.”

 

The blush always gets her, makes her cheeks burn with a squirming sort of pleasure. She still can’t quite believe that the giant hairy man with the scarred face and gruff demeanour chose her, among all of the women in Westeros, to fall in love with. Of course society deems it that Sandor is the lucky bastard, and Sansa has quietly lowered herself - how many people came up to her, when they learned about her and her husband, and told her she could do so much better? So many. She smiled politely, raged internally, thanked them for their concern, but assured them that she was happy.

 

He looks right here, in the North. Sandor has the look, the colouring, unlike Sansa; he is dark winter and she is glowing autumn. In the past strangers have assumed that he is the Stark as his grey eyes and long black hair give him that dour roughness of the Northman. Sansa is all Tully prettiness, and midlander sensibilities.

 

“I can’t believe we’re here. Finally. Our own little house, Sandor. All ours!”

 

A massive hand finds her waist, pulls her close to that solidly muscled chest she adores, and Sansa breaths in salt, and heather, and freshness.

 

“You won’t need any of them pretty dresses you brought, little bird.”

 

“I’ll just wear them for you, then,” she murmurs, luxuriating in his arms. “Maybe with those old-fashioned stockings, and the wedding shoes?”

 

“Sansa-” He catches her eye, and even though they’ve been married for five years, and together for seven, she relishes how she makes Sandor’s eyes narrow, pupils drugged, with the thought of her in silks and lace.

 

“We should go and check if they’ve put the bed in the right room, you know?” Tracing a nail around the collar of his heavy-cabled gansey Sansa knit for him.

 

“Woman,” he growls, a low oil slick and wet sand of a sound, before scooping Sansa up in his beautiful strong arms and marching her inside as she squeals with giddy excitement.

 

* * *

 

The first inkling is when she is spinning, foot treadling, the softness in her hands a mixture of the sturdy local wool from the friendly next-door farmer and some rather more exotic merino in a deep rich merlot. She finds a relaxation in the action of drawing out and turning the wheel, the radio playing softly, the front door ajar and letting in the tang of sea air, and seaweed, and the axe-chop of Sandor stockpiling for the woodpile. Domestic, really. Domestic, and gentle-drifting, and as far from the hectic hellishness of King’s Landing as there could ever be.

 

It is strange, she always thinks, looking back. How desperate Sansa was to go to the capital, because she loved Joffrey, and the rich jewel-promise, and the exotic difference of a city to her country home. Of course, she should have known. She’s read all of the Regency novels where an innocent naive girl from a village in the middle of nowhere chases the bright lights and marvel, and ends up broken, spoiled, and usually marrying a very understanding clergyman who looks past the infamy that dogs her. So desperate to leave the North.

 

So desperate to return.

 

Spinning warms her, a pleasing tug of thigh muscles and wrists that makes her feel like she is doing something more than crafting yarn. The bobbin spins, the wheel wobbles just slightly; that needs fixing, but Sansa is used to the peculiarities of her traditional. Spinning wheels have personalities, and hers, vintage and second-hand and possessing tales she can only dream of, is a little battered, a little wonky, and utterly beloved.

 

Finally coming to a natural pause, Sansa straightens in her chair, tugs her hair elastic from her messy bun to rearrange as too many strands are escaping, idly gazing out towards the sea and her sweating manly husband who, in half an hour, she’ll take a beer out to, admire his handiwork, and hopefully receive a sweaty pheromone-laden cuddle. Stew for dinner, with hunks of home-made fresh bread. Apples baked with sugar and drizzled with cream for afters. The radio plays something dreamy and classical, a drifting of sense across her relaxation like the faint whisper of silk.

 

It is then that it happens - whatever it is.

 

Static envelops the radio while a coldness slowly, but surely, envelops her. In a moment the temperature plummets, gooseflesh breaking out as something caresses the bare nape of her neck.

 

When Sansa turns, with a squeak, there is nothing there.

 

She puts it down, eventually, because rationally there is nothing else it could be, to an errant draft from the window behind her and the distance from the radio tower combined with atmospheric peculiarities playing havoc with the signal

 

But, oddly, when she checks everything is locked up before they go to bed that evening, there are no cracks in the frame, and no obvious air flow.

 

* * *

 

“Sansa?”

 

“Hmm?” She looks up from her knitting; Jeyne and Robb are expecting again, so she is in full baby-clothing mode. The cardigan is doggedly unisex, since her brother and his wife never find out the gender of the babies until they are safely born; green and yellow, and reminding Sansa of the original illustrations for _Winnie the Pooh_.

 

“You seen my phone?”

 

“No, I thought it was charging in the bedroom?

 

“Yeah, so did I.”

 

“It must be under something.”

 

“I’ve looked.” A note of irritation roughens his voice. Sandor sometimes needs to be surgically detached from his phone, especially during the football season, or when he’s having bonding time with his friends. It’s strange that before they were together her husband had few acquaintances, but since moving into Sansa’s circle, which is quite expansive and filled with people from all walks of life, he has quite the social life. Or, at least, he has a phone-based social life. It is as if the moment Sandor gained mates, he is loathe to let them go. Understandable really, even if he still maintains, stubbornly, that he is a lone wolf. Sometimes it seems as if he talks to Jaime, Bronn, and her brothers more than her.

 

Sansa doesn’t begrudge that at all.

 

They turn the croft upside down, and eventually locate the handset in, of all places, a wellington boot nestled deep within the coat cupboard.

 

“I’ve not been in there today.”

 

“That’s so strange,” she murmurs, rubbing at her cheek.

 

“Maybe we’ve got a ghost?”

 

They laugh, easy and amused.

 

* * *

 

The croft is ancient, and the black leaded range which runs the rickety central heating system, hot water, and acts as their cooker, is far past retirement age. Unlike King’s Landing where a cord was pulled and the fancy electric shower heated the water with an element, she relies on the battered cast iron tub and a plastic jug to rinse off her acres of chestnut hair. Everything is simple, and out of date, and both charming and frustrating in turn. Sometimes she yearns for a power shower, the spray needles massaging aching shoulders and sore hips. The upside, however, is that the bath is enormous, and Sansa and Sandor can, with a little ingenuity, both fit in the tub at the same time. They have bath nights; candles, and a bottle of wine for her and a good heavy Northern bitter for him, followed by damp-skinned languid lovemaking on their iron-framed bed.

 

Sansa, yawning and chilled as the house never retains heat, blasts the hot water tap in the old-fashioned porcelain sink, waiting for the warm to come through as she sleepily brushes her teeth.

 

Steam. Good for pores and waking up, especially on a morning where early frost lies like icing sugar across the mountains, and the sea turns that peculiar stormy blue that reminds Sansa of Shireen and Rickon.

 

Idly she spits, rinses, glances into the steamed looking glass.

 

“Sandor?”

 

“Mmmph?” He’s still in bed, warm and comfortable under the duvet, which is unfair.

 

“Thank you for the message on the mirror.”

 

It’s quite romantic for him to do such a thing. Block capitals, in a shaky hand so he must have been either tipsy or exhausted the previous evening - both, probably, as it had been date night - right across the glass. Of course the finger grease means that the lettering only emerges when the steam paints the surface of the mirror, and it hadn’t been there the previous evening.

 

Especially as Sandor isn’t fond of the operetta of _Florian and Jonquil_. He hates knights and maidens fair, calling it all complete and utter bollocks that no right-minded cunt would ever enjoy.

 

“What you talkin’ about?” he mutters, hair snarled, naked as he pads across the cold stone flags. “Didn’t do nothin’.”

 

“But-?”

 

He rubs his eyes muzzily, opens his mouth to say something. Swallows, and tries once more to speak.

 

“That’s not my writing, little bird.”

 

* * *

 

The manager of the Bolton letting portfolio is unlike what they expect. When securing the tenancy on the croft, they dealt with a letting agent purposely employed to vet prospective renters. Indeed, Sansa and Sandor hadn’t even met their landlord, spoken with him, even mentioned him; the rather upmarket estate agents were, in turn, snobbish over having an actual Stark in one of their properties, and leery at having someone as rough-seeming as a Clegane. They attended interviews, and had their income scrutinised, and really, as Sansa feebly joked after yet another grilling by the round-faced man with the plump be-ringed fingers and eyes that seemed to analyse mercilessly for entire hour that Mr. Varys talked down at them, adopting a child seemed easier in comparison.

 

However, the man who climbs from the mud-spattered Land Rover Defender is just a little shorter than Sandor, redhaired and eye patched, and dressed in what Sansa thinks of as typical gamekeeper gear; flat tweed cap, waxed jacket, corduroy trousers. No shotgun, no spaniel, but he is accompanied by a short, malicious-looking young man with very pale eyes and dark hair.

 

“Nice to meet you - I’m sorry that I’ve not been over this way to say hello yet. You moved in right at the start of grouse season, and it’s been quite mad. Beric. Beric Dondarrion. I’m Lord Bolton’s property manager. This is Ramsay.”

 

The young man regards them, and Sansa almost shivers. He’s creepy. He seems very out of place in this landscape.

 

Sandor shakes hands with Dondarrion, ignores this Ramsay who doesn’t seem to care. His eyes flick over Sansa with a strange intimacy, and she finds herself inching closer to the warm vastness of her husband..

 

“Sandor and Sansa Clegane.”

 

“Would you like tea?” Aware that they are guests, even if technically they represent the man who owns their home, Sansa feels even more in edge.

 

“You’re fine, thanks. Very kind of you to offer though, isn’t it Ramsay?”

 

Daggers are glared, and the smaller man hunches in his leather jacket.

 

“Don’t mind him at all. He hates doing the rounds, but Lord Bolton wants him to learn the ropes for when he takes over. Can’t rely on me all the time, can you, Ramsay?”

 

“Fuck off.” A snarl. “You’re so much Dad’s bitch it’s unreal.”

 

“Huh.” Amusement paints Sandor’s voice coal-tar. “That Ramsay.”

 

“That Ramsay.” Dondarrion nudges That Ramsay with an elbow. “Who is supposedly behaving for me, aren’t you?”

 

He is resolutely ignored by Bolton, who turns on his booted heel and stalks his way down the path towards the sea. Every movement is restrained hatred, coiled loathing.

 

“He loves me really. Right, these locks? You say there was an intruder?”

 

“They wrote on the bathroom mirror. I took a photo.” Rummaging through Sandor’s phone, skipping the pictures of her that are for her husband’s eyes only, she finds the right one. Even though by then the steam was fading, the words still cling to existence.

 

“A literary intruder? That’s a new one. _Florian and Jonquil_ is something I don’t see every day.” He smiles, though there is a softness to it, as if Beric truly cares. “Look, I’m making light of it, but it must have been a bloody shock for you to find that in your bathroom. I’ll do whatever I can to make sure nothing like it happens again. I’ll get the rent reduced for you for six months as well, as a gesture of goodwill. You’re already excellent tenants, and we really want to keep you. The place is looking lovely, and, hells, it’s a decent croft. I used to live here, you know? Year and a half of peace and quiet is what you need when you come out of a stressful situation.”

 

“We came from King’s Landing. Where did you move from?”

 

Dondarrion smiles, and is, in an instant, quite handsome. “The south.”

 

“See why you’d need to get away.” Sandor nodded.

 

“R’hllor helped. It is quite a peaceful religion, underneath the fire worship.”

 

* * *

 

The message upon the mirror the following morning brings Sansa up short.

 

**_Sorry_. **

 

The writing this time, scribed by a different hand, swoops florid and elegant across the sweating glass.

 

* * *

 

Unfortunately, isolation means an internet service that is about as quick as a bowlful of falling treacle. Before they moved, Sansa researched the area about the croft, but not the building itself; she fell in love with descriptions of wild rugged shorelines, and heather-smeared bees buzzing lazily in the sunlight, and moorlands that ran and ran from the teeth-shard mountains to the glistening sea. Wild, and free, like Sandor, with pockets of refinement in handsome gritstone villages nestled about v-slashed valley harbours. A balance, perhaps, of the old and the new, of huge skies and intimate ancient weirwood.

 

Searching ‘ _Dreadfort crofts_ ’ brings up the Bolton property company. The website, unsurprisingly well-made and maintained given Roose’s propensity for business, is black and cream, and pink the colour of undercooked liver. The ‘About Us’ contains moody black and white images of the Dreadfort, of Beric gazing into middle distance with his hair artistically untidy, of Lord Bolton himself. The man looks frighteningly like his son about the eyes, but is taller, leaner. He stares into the lens, at the website viewer, silently challenging.

 

The photography, and this is surprising, is credited to Ramsay himself. To her artist’s eye, she can tell he’s more than very good. Thinking back, there was a sleek compact camera hanging from a cord about his neck, half-hidden by his leather jacket.

 

She searches more, intrigued. The gallery is more of the same, though contains colour images of the ancestral Bolton home now given to the National Trust, and every building in their eye-wateringly large portfolio. Lots of large black-jawed mastiffs, magnificently muscled and sleek. The Boltons breed them. Where the photographs come alive, however, is when Ramsay captures humans. Like portraiture of the seventeenth century onwards, he seems to portray his muse ‘warts and all.’ Roose, handsome and snake-like, makes her very uneasy. Beric, who appears rather more regularly, grins affably and seems to indulge Bolton. There he is with a shotgun, gazing to the sky. Striding across purpled hillsides, a scruffy small terrier at his side and looking completely at home. Each image has a caption, sometimes terse, but more florid when Dondarrion is involved.

 

Sansa quickly comes to the conclusion that Ramsay fancies the pants off the tall redhaired estate manager, stuffing her hand into her mouth to stop the giggles that threaten to spill.

 

She moves on, unwillingly, though saves a gloriously dramatic picture of their own croft. Storm clouds boil and threaten over the sea as the waves grind against the pebble-dashed sand. The little house stands defiant and whitewashed, even as the coming tempest threatens to obliterate. Once Sansa sets it as her laptop wallpaper, she sees more detail; a motorcycle tucked under the lean-to, and a familiar small scruffy terrier.

 

Ploughing onwards, she changes tack.

 

‘ _Ghosts crofts Dreadfort_.’

 

The usual nonsense about the castle being haunted by the spirits of the Bolton damned and their flayed victims. Not that the flaying is incorrect - history teaches of the War of the Five Kings, the coming of Winter, and the murder of the Lord Bolton by his own bastard son, and it definitely lingers upon the singular torture method of the sons of the Dreadfort - but the ghosts?

 

Sansa doesn’t believe in ghosts.

 

They are a very Northern idea to obsess over. Her entire family, bar Catelyn who is from Riverrun and therefore more sensible than the superstitious Stark clan tends to be, believes in the supernatural. Rickon and his obsession over direwolves, his burgeoning business as a conservationist of the rare lesser wolves of the forests beyond the Wall. Arya’s blood lust, her fascination with dead things. She works as a mortician under various strange men, and Sansa is almost convinced she sleeps with them all. Bran is Bran. He says things that have yet to happen, and does not look smug when they come true. He talks of the past and the future as if they are merely happening before him in an instant. Robb? Most normal, she supposes, but he is a little more like Mother than the others. Like Sansa, in a way, although he also loves wolves, and swords, and chivalry; no wonder he’s made captain in his elite army unit. Tactically, he’s brilliant, and always says he looks back to the past for inspiration.

 

She always wonders how she shares a parentage with her siblings. Sansa is different. If her brothers and sister are the beating heart of the North, she is, in some ways, the South. Sandor told her that. He told her that as he kissed her throat, twisting them both so she was atop his naked body, and proclaimed that she possessed some of the Northern darkness in her soul, the glowing warmth of the South in her smile.

 

Sansa straddles worlds, and is neither nor.

 

Unless she is here. In this croft, with the wind and waves and the bleating of hardy sheep, she feels alive, whole, belonging. The wildness pulls her bones and blood, and she feels herself ride upon air currents, and dig into the sparse sandy/stony soil, and roam the moorland like a wild creature of the North.

 

She turns more North with each passing year.

 

* * *

 

Finally, she finds something.

 

_A History of the Last Croft_

 

_Last Croft stands at the mouth of the Weeping Water, and belongs to the Bolton estate. It has belonged to the estate for the last thousand years, and was originally built during the Targaryen period before the War of the Five Kings._

 

_Last Croft is a rare surviving example of the Northern Long House tradition, though the current configuration is not how the building originally appeared. It is made of rough dressed stone, and traditional lime mortar, crowned with slates. All of these are locally quarried, even today, providing many of the jobs in the Weeping Water area. Previously, Last Croft would have been an extended manse/farmhouse, encompassing a courtyard to three sides; however only the main building remains, as the two wings were demolished in c1750. Last Croft has been extensively but sympathetically modernised by the Bolton family, and is now part of their property portfolio._

 

_It is said that Last Croft is haunted by the tragic ghosts of soldiers who were killed during the Battle for the Dawn. Why they were at Last Croft, it is not known. Excavation work carried out by the Bolton family in the 1980’s found little to support such a claim, but previous tenants have reported odd occurrences, especially regarding electrical and electronic items._

 

_Who these ghosts are is a mystery. One theory is that they deserted, fled the Battle, and were slaughtered by the Others when the Dreadfort fell. Some, however, think the spirits are those of a loving couple, who lived their last days at the croft. While the cottage is small by today’s standards, for those living in the North during the period, it was actually a rather well-appointed house. The Bolton excavations found evidence of several wings to the croft, which have been demolished in the more recent past, possibly due to the property falling into disrepair._

 

_Having lived in Last Croft for a short period, I am convinced that the spirits of the restless do indeed remain. My own experiences are nothing shocking, but proved inexplicable. My mobile telephone ended up in the oddest places, often to be found in the linen cupboard, or the hall closet. Strange cold patches materialised in rooms where there were no drafts. Televisions switched themselves on and off, and, for some reason, the electric kettle seemed to be a popular toy for one of the spirits._

 

_A young friend, who came to stay for one weekend, reported words printed upon the mirror after she bathed. I was saddened but unsurprised when she fled for the comfort of a nearby hotel than agree to stay one more night at Last Croft._

 

_Other experiences, too numerous to recall, also occurred._

 

_My own view is this: whatever or whoever these spirits are, they are an unknown quantity. They have their own personalities, and ‘voices’, and while I never felt threatened by them, one can never dismiss the possibility of malevolence and darkness, especially within those who lived at such a terrible time in Westerosi history._

 

_(Taken from the article, ‘A History of the Last Croft,’ by M. Reed, 2003, www.greenseers.westeros.org)_

 

* * *

 

Usually Sansa tells Sandor everything. They are the sort of couple who knows, with one look, if anything needs to be said. He is her best friend, her dark knight, the one who saved her from King’s Landing twice, and brought her North both times. There are so very few secrets between them that it feels so very strange to not grab him by the hand, show him the article written by this M.Reed, ask him - and it seems so childish to even consider this - if he does believe in ghosts.

 

“I’m going into town,” she calls, tucking errant strands of red behind her ear. The chill comes more readily as the moon passes, and she’s indulging herself in soft alpaca mittens and a matching cowl that wraps her hair and neck in a cloud of delicate warmth. “Is there anything you need?”

 

Sandor looks up, sweat running over his shoulders, darkening the hair on his chest. Even now, as the weather draws and the seafoam whips, and frost scrims the long dead heathers upon the hills, he refuses to chop wood while wearing a shirt. He looks. Everything. He looks half-god half devil with his broad muscled back tapering to powerful hips and thighs, dark hair over tea-tanned skin. When she was younger, Sansa dreamed of slender willowy boys with beautiful faces. They were not terrifying at all, never exuding a raw male sexuality that makes her dry lips stick to her teeth, her breath shatter in her chest.

 

They never wore beards that grow patchy due to scars, or tied their long black hair up into a scruffy bun to keep it from their eyes, or looked at her with a naked desperate hunger that possesses every molecule of her body. Their prettiness, and metrosexuality, is nothing when faced with a monolith of man carved a thousand years before in the perfection of a warrior, a brute, a magnificence of flesh and bone and burning grey-black eyes.

 

How easy would it be to take him by his damp, red-calloused hand, lead him inside, unbutton their jeans and just ride him upon the battered settee in her spinning room? In another life, Sansa could never have conceived of sex with a man who wasn’t showered and clean and neat. Pristine. Perfect. With Sandor, who is everything, they find themselves unable to stop themselves from hungry, desperate fucking - he calls it fucking when they are so needy, and Sansa thrills with it as he fucks her - whenever the need arises.

 

Which, she admits, biting her lip and willing herself into the driver’s seat of the Hilux, is a lot.

 

“Beers.” He pauses, and he looks at home. He looks, with his carved flesh and muscle and sinew, like the landscape and the croft. Sandor is the North, as if he should have been here all along. “We’re alright for most stuff. Get oats though, and treacle. I’ll make your nice bread for you.”

 

“I love you.”

 

His narrow-lipped mouth twitches into that equally narrow smile of his; it knots deep in Sansa’s belly.

 

“Be careful, little bird.”

 

Sandor rarely says he loves her, but he doesn’t need to. He expresses it in every glance, and movement, and touch. In every breath. In everything.

 

* * *

 

“Why can’t the bitch keep her nose out of shit she doesn’t understand?”

 

“Ramsay.” Pointed, none of the amused warmth from before, and Sansa realises, with a sudden twist in her chest, that Bolton is talking about her. “You will be polite, or I’ll-”

 

“You’ll what? What’ll you do, Beric?” The laughter sneers, dripping and ichor-thick.

 

“I can do a whole bloody lot, and don’t you forget it. Don’t forget what I know, and about whom. Thank your lucky stars it’s only the croft that she’s interested in. The way you go on-”

 

“Did you know the Starks are supposed to be wargs?”

 

“You’ve told me seven times already. Yes. I do.”

 

“She’s not fucking North enough. Not like us, or the Mormonts.”

 

“And I am?”

 

“You’re different. You know you are, corpse. One day, I’ll watch you die, and it’ll be beautiful.”

 

“And they say romance is dead.” His tone is as flat as his vowels.

 

“That means you’ll let me fuck you? For science?”

 

Beric sighs, obviously at the end of his very long tether. “Ramsay. For the umpteenth time, I am not going to sleep with you. I understand your position, and how difficult it is for you, and I know that’s why you act out, but no. We are not going to have sex. It is unprofessional.”

 

“You’re no fun. Why did Dad employ you again?”

 

“Because I’m bloody good at my job, I’m personable, and-”

 

“Unkillable is useful, bitc-” Bolton pauses midway through his sentence. “She’s listening in.”

 

Rustling, footsteps across soft carpet, and the door handle snicks. Dondarrion assured her they’d be able to ask for a private room in the hotel in which they agreed to meet, and the concierge sent her down a winding madness of tiny corridors until she found the ‘Manderley Suite.’ All of the conference rooms in the building are named after various ancient Northern families. Most of them still exist, in some form or another, but history is Bran’s area, not hers. He traces family trees, researches ancient bloodlines, talks of the participants as if he knows the intimacies of their existence.

 

“Sansa. Will you come in?” Beric’s usually calm yellowy eyes seem a little sharper, frustrated perhaps, and she attributes that to the lounging dark haired young man who had his boots on the coffee table.

 

“Thank you.”

 

Ramsay must have heard a creak of floorboards, or her sharp intake shocked breath, to have known she was hiding outside the room. He watches her, cruel pale-eyed stare unblinking as Sansa settles into a chair. Thankfully the table shields her from Bolton’s physical form, and, for the first time, and this is stupid she tells herself, Sansa wishes she’d brought Sandor with her.

 

“No Clegane today?” How difficult it is not to shiver when Ramsay addresses her directly.

 

“We’re getting the croft ready for winter.”

 

“Winter is coming.” When Ramsay grins, his teeth are sharkish. He is entirely disconcerting, and not a little creepy. “Isn’t that a Stark thing? Like warging and dying pathetically at weddings and being Kings in the North?”

 

“Ignore him, Mrs. Clegane.” Beric, fed up and exhausted-looking - he’s shadowed under his eye sockets, and paler than he was when he came to change the locks - scruffs a hand through his red-gold hair. “He’s been a prick all day.”

 

“Language, Beric. Don’t speak like that in front of Lady Sansa.”

 

“Ramsay!” Biting the name, Dondarrion glowers. “You will stay and be silent, or you will bugger off and do whatever the hells you want.”

 

Power struggles are fascinating and uncomfortable to watch. Amber irritation meets mocking silver, and for a long moment the energy in the room changes from an underlying tension to an all out war. Gooseflesh prickling her arms, Sansa finds herself, unnervingly, curled into herself, knees to her chin, as the men silently stare. Arguments horribly, achingly, remind her of Joffrey and Petyr, and King’s Landing, and everything Sandor rescued her from the first time he brought her North. A broken engagement with a man who cheated constantly and beat her senseless was nothing compared to Baelish’s careful grooming. He comforted her after Sansa finally seized the strength to break up with Joffrey, made sure she ate, brought her pretty gifts to make her feel better. Built her confidence, her trust.

 

Told her, as he pushed her against a wall in the recesses of the student union, kissed her neck as she squeezed her eyes shut very tightly, that he deserved to have something in return.

 

Sandor, thank the Mother, smashed Petyr in the face with an almost careless punch, mopped Sansa up as if she were a puddle, and promised to get her home to her mother.

 

“I don’t even know you,” she’d sobbed into his chest. “Why are you being so nice to me?”

 

“Because you fucking need someone to be nice to you, Red. Shit. Don’t even know your name.”

 

She sniffled, blearily, owlishly looking up the height of her scarred, muscled saviour. His name badge - all the university bar staff wore them - said ‘ _Sandor_.’ “Sansa.”

 

“Where you live, Sansa?”

 

She named the halls of residence, and the man, half-smiling, half-murderous, shook his dark head. “No. Where you from? I think you could do with your Mum, yeah?”

 

“I-I do want to go home.” Tears and mascara poured down her cheeks, and she startled as Sandor took some tissues from his pocket, pressing them clumsily into her shaking hands. “I want my Mum.”

 

“Right. C’mon.”

 

“Where are we-?”

 

“Taking you wherever you need to be, Sansa.”

 

By the time he’d driven her to Winterfell in his battered tank of a Volvo, without stopping, out of his head on caffeine and Mars Bars, and she’d collapsed into Cat’s loving warm embrace, Sansa had fallen a little in love with the taciturn giant with the filthy voice.

 

Finally, after decades, eons, Ramsay shoves himself to his feet and stalks from the room. He leaves a trail of hate that can almost be tasted, and Sansa finds herself worrying at the skin at the corner of her mouth with her fingernails; a hang up, a tic, from years before.

 

“I’m sorry, Sansa.” A warm hand touches her own, gently tugging her away from her picking. “He’s insufferable, and,” Beric crouches before her, all careful regard and allowing her a certain autonomy, “I’m sorry that you heard and saw that. He’s difficult to deal with quite a lot of the time, and I think most of my job is to keep him contained so he doesn’t go on a murder spree.”

 

A smile, and Beric retreats into being that very calm, very relaxed normality he cultivates. “I’m joking, I promise.” His hand is a few degrees colder than she expected, and oddly dry.

 

“He’s quite intense?”

 

“Very. If you’d met his father, you’d understand. Gods help anyone having Roose Bolton as their father. Anyway, we’re not here for me to psychoanalyse Ramsay, are we? We’re here because of the croft.”

 

She’d prepared a speech before overhearing the conversation, which has thrown chunks of it out of the window. In it Sansa described what she found on the internet, how it matched what already occurred, how the change of locks hasn’t prevented the strange things happening. She’d ask him if he knew anything else, and then coax from Beric the truth about the undead occupants of her home.

 

Now, however?

 

“There are ghosts, aren’t there?” Everything, distilled into one sentence.

 

Dondarrion watches her levelly, still knelt at her side. He is still quite handsome, even with the eyepatch and the scars, but Sansa’s idea of perfection is even more battered, even more broken. He moves, though, with a grace that Sandor does not possess; fluid, and even, and quick. So very quick for a man of around six feet four and possessing the strong build of the outdoorsman.

 

“Have they hurt you?”

 

“Why would they?”

 

“They...don’t like certain people.” Sansa waits, and the chasm of silence yawns, but Beric breaks it as he rises to his feet, takes the seat next to her on the smart modern couch. “There are reasons I moved out, though very few know.”

 

“I deserve to know.” She does. She lives in the croft, and while she never feels in danger, if there is any chance she or Sandor could be attacked-

 

“Yes. Yes, you do. I’m sorry, Sansa. I should have told you before, when you said about the mirror writing and the moving mobile phones. You just seem so happy at Last Croft, and I didn’t want to ruin that for you. It wants someone like you and Sandor about, making the place into a home, like it always should be. I tried, but-” Those big shoulders roll, Beric smiling so very faintly. “When your boss and his son can’t set foot over the threshold, it makes things rather awkward.”

 

“They don’t like Ramsay?” Not surprising. Who does like Ramsay? Even Beric loses his endless patience with Bolton.

 

“He’s an acquired taste. All Boltons are, to be honest. Do you remember your history of the War of the Five Kings, and the Battle for the Dawn?”

 

Sansa casts her mind back to long-lingering lessons a decade before. She never paid much attention, apart from with the Stark connexion, because, before she lost her naivete in King’s Landing, history was more myth than reality. Knights, ladies, tourneys. Romance. _Florian and Jonquil_ , written upon the bathroom mirror.

 

“Didn’t they betray the North?”

 

“The North’s never quite forgotten it, and neither have the ghosts. I think they are from the War of the Five Kings - they always referred to Ramsay as the Bastard and Roose as the Flayer, so there must still be that lingering familial resemblance there. The first and only time Ramsay went into Last Croft, I spent the next week or so sourcing handblown replacements for every windowpane, getting new glassware and lightbulbs, wondering if someone else breaking the mirrors means I get the seven years bad luck. At least the one with the nicer writing apologised for getting me caught up in the shrapnel.”

 

“The other one is the one that wrote _Florian and Jonquil_. It’s as if they’ve got their own personalities.”

 

“They do.” Beric seems to want to say something, but drags the words back with a shake of his head. “I would love to know who they are, to look them up in history books.”

 

“Did you ever ask?”

 

The thought is a foolish one, and Sansa almost laughs at herself for her idiocy, before she sees incredulity flood Dondarrion’s face.

 

“...no. I didn’t. Of all the dickheads in all the world.”

 

“We could ask, couldn’t we?”

 

“That is a bloody good idea, Sansa. We need to get their attention, though. We need to make them want to talk to us. All of the times anything has happened, apart from once, I didn’t know until later.”

 

“What was the once?”

 

Beric’s hands are as scarred as his face.

 

“They responded to Ramsay. Yes. Right. We get Ramsay in there, and we ask them why they hate him so much.”

 

* * *

 

_The Myths and Families of the North_

 

_Like the rest of Westeros, the North has its own legends, myths, stories. Unlike other kingdoms, these tales are usually affixed to families and not to supernatural races. This is not, of course, to say that the supernatural does not exist in the North; merely that the families and the magic are so deeply intertwined that none know where they begin or end. Families, in the North, are the alpha and omega of everything. Of all of the Seven Kingdoms, the North is the wildest, the weirdest, the most attuned to the Beyond and the innate magic that exists in the world that, in these modern times, is seen as nothing but the fancy of the eccentric._

 

_According to what is said:_

 

_The Great House of Stark, Kings of Winter, is one of wargs, who prowl the vast wastes riding the minds of their dire wolf familiars._

 

_Their dread enemy, the Boltons, are leech worshipping undead blood drinkers, possibly millennia old._

 

_To the north, the Mormonts, the werebears of the Isle; their women mate with their ursine cousins, producing humanoid cubs of rare strength and furriness._

 

_My own clan, the Reeds, the Greenseers, are fae creatures of the Beyond who see the endless future in their emerald-tinted dreams._

 

_Umbers, giant-blood pouring through their veins - c.f. Duncan the Tall legends, I am sure that he and his descendants on Tarth are of the Umber bloodline - are still taller and fiercer than others in their vicinity despite their human appearance._

 

_Others carry the blood of the Free Folk, the so-called Wildings, with their ice magics and hardy constitution. Indeed, it can be said that it is rare to find a Northern family that has no legend attached to its name._

 

_One may believe or disbelieve these myths - whether they are fact or fiction is to be decided by the individual. However, as I have seen in the dreams of green that turn my attention to matters beyond the mortal, smoke without fire does not exist unless born from the loins of a Red Priestess of R’hllor._

 

 _(‘The Myths and Families of the North: An Introduction,’_ by J. Reed, 2006 _, www.greenseers.westeros.org_ _)_

 

* * *

 

“You want Dondarrion to bring Bolton into the house so some ghosts can go fucking mad at the creepy little cunt and smash the place to bits?”

 

When put like that, the entire scheme seems particularly hairbrained.

 

“It keeps happening, Sandor.” She sighs, resting her cheek upon his shoulder, and even if she is being foolish, her husband wraps her into his muscle-armed embrace. There is nothing safer in the world than being held by Sandor. He is strength, and solidity, and familiarity, and protection. He is salt-rimed kisses. Heat. Passion. Surly adoration. Physicality that transcends his form and prowls about her like a beast, driving her half-mad with need. “I’m not afraid, not really, but I wish Capitals would stop hiding the phone and playing with the radio so much.

 

“Capitals?”

 

“...he writes in capital letters,” she mumbles against his skin, hair tickling the bridge of her nose.

 

“So the other is?”

 

“Cursive. She’s nice.”

 

“You’ve gendered your ghosts?” Sansa hears his eyebrow arching at the revelation.

 

“Just...that’s how they seem. I don’t know. Beric says they seem like that, and-”

 

“I’m going to fucking give him a piece of my mind.”

 

“What other explanation is there?” Having wracked her mind for weeks, Sansa can’t see anything else making sense. Not that ghosts make sense, but that conversation between Beric and Ramsay keeps churning in her head, and she wonders, a tiny almost frightened part of her hungry to know though worried about the truth, if there is anything in the rumours of ghosts, and if Bolton does worship leeches, and if that is true, perhaps the Starks are wargs, and the Umbers giants, and J.Reed does dream in green?

 

If that is true, and Beric knows, does that make him different, also?

 

“You’ve not been spinning.” His large hands span her back, wrapping about her hips. “You’ve just been reading shit online, ever since you went to talk to Dondarrion. Sansa.”

 

“I know, I’ll catch up. I won’t get too behind, and I’ve got yarn to send to the companies-”

 

“Fuck the companies,” and his voice rattles, hoarse and low. “I’m worried about you, not some shit designer who doesn’t pay you enough anyway. You’re not eating properly, you’re not sleeping right. You talk to them, I’ve heard you. Saying hi, and good morning. I’m worried, alright? You’ll make yourself ill again, like with that cunt,” and Sandor never says Petyr’s name, not since he rescued Sansa and drove her North.

 

“Please, I just need to know. We can just do this, and when I know, we can go back to being normal. I promise, Sandor.”

 

Those granite-flecked eyes examine her, thoroughly - not just what he sees, but underneath that, under bone and skin, into Sansa’s very soul. Sandor peels layers, exposes a core that she kept hidden from others, even her own family, for so very long. For a man who says he has the emotional capacity of brick, when it comes to her, he is perceptive and sharp and needling. Sandor is a man who watches, who learns, who is more than he believes himself to be. His armour is brusque honesty, a scalemail concealing his true goodness, his vitality, that unwilling intelligence that sets him above others.

 

Finally.

 

Sandor exhales, hair covering them both like a shroud as he kisses her forehead.

 

“Do it. Get it over with.”

 

* * *

 

“I’m not going in there, bitch.” Ramsay, charming as ever, snarls at Dondarrion. “Last time I went in there, I was picking glass out of my arse for a week.”

 

“You’re going in there, Ramsay.” Beric, arms crossed across his broad chest, seems unwilling to back down. “For, as you’d say because you’re an internet addict, science.”

 

“I. Hate. Ghosts. Especially those ones. Ghosts with issues are the worst. Why don’t they like me? What’ve I ever done to them? It’s not like I killed them, is it? At least I don’t think I did? It’s not like I flayed the fuckers, is it? Not like with San-”

 

Dondarrion interrupts. “You know why, Ramsay. You are going to turn around, and go in there, or am I going to have to carry you?”

 

“Only if you put a ring on it first, then you’re doing the whole carrying me over the threshold thing.” He grins, viciously. Sansa didn’t realise how short he is; Ramsay comes up, just, to Beric’s shoulder, even in his big boots. Pocket-sized psychopath.

 

“Shift your arse.”

 

“Make me.”

 

Beric’s strength is not surprising, but the ease in which he throws Bolton, swearing and biting over his shoulder, is. One arm, and not even any strain, and Ramsay squirms, punching at kidneys with murderous knuckles, trying to boot his captor in the face. A shake of his head, a vaguely apologetic smile at Sansa, and he adjusts the tantruming man into a more comfortable position.

 

“Where would you like us?”

 

“Going to kill you, you evil dead bastard! I’m gonna tear your throat out and shit down your neck, you absolute slab of flesh-!”

 

“Ramsay. Shush.”

 

“We cleared the front room.”

 

“-cut your shrivelled heart out with a flaying knife! I’ll gut you like a pig, bitch!-”

 

A large scarred hand meets, rifle-crack sharp, with Bolton’s backside. Everyone stops dead, apart from Dondarrion, who strolls forward as if he’s carrying a sack of feed, perfectly comfortable with what he’s just done.

 

“This,” Sandor points out and Sansa thinks it doesn’t need to be voiced but is still the truth, “is even more fucked up than I thought it was going to be.”

 

* * *

 

The living room, with the soft comfortable chairs, and the handwoven wall art, and the ancient and much loved woodburning stove, looks out towards the sea. Each tiny latticed pane possesses the ripples that comes of old, hand-blown glass, a faint greeny tinge to the weak light trickling into the small, cosy room. Sansa loves this space. She sits, curled in a chair with her knitting, or a book, the radio playing softly, aware of the hypnosis the water and rock and sky can bring. It is a view to be lost to, to plummet into nothing for. It bewitches. Atmospherically, the room is one of relaxation. Even the tension in Sandor’s neck lessens when he sprawls across the settee, head in Sansa’s lap, finding that mindspace where he is at ease with himself, the world.

 

Tension should never be here, but, now, the pleasant cheer of the room changes in an instant into a cloying cold-soup of a thing, wrapping tendrils about Sansa’s arms and hair. It tastes of ozone, and darkness, and a terrible, non-directed anger.

 

Beric drops Ramsay, albeit gently, onto the settee. The younger man looks, for once, perturbed; white-eyed and his lips peeling from his white sharp teeth.

 

“Please don’t destroy the house,” Dondarrion murmurs as something creaks alarmingly.

 

“I’ll fucking kill you myself if you smash our shit up. Ghost or no ghost, I’ll wring your bastard necks.”

 

“Yeah. Taunt them. Why don’t you piss them off? Great fucking idea. Didn’t think you believed, Deep Fried.” Of course Ramsay throws Sandor’s burns at him. Of course her husband gives him a death glare that, given the circumstances and Bolton’s skittishness, actually shuts that cruel mouth.

 

“Look. I’m sorry I’ve brought him back. I promised not to, and I understand if you’re angry with me, but please don’t destroy Sansa and Sandor’s home. This was my idea, not theirs, and that wouldn’t be fair. From my dealings with you, I know that you’re honourable. Sansa wants to talk with you, and I thought since you react so strongly to Ramsay, having him here may tempt you to come out, investigate."

 

Another creak. Sansa has never heard glass make that sort of tormented sound before. She finds herself, suddenly, wrapped in Sandor’s arms. His hold doesn’t tremble, but every hair covering his forearms stands on end.

 

Cold. So very cold.

 

Beric, and even he looks nervy, nods at her, prompting Sansa to say something, anything, just speak.

 

“I just...hello. I just wanted to talk to you, if that’s fine with you? There’s a pen, and paper, or a mirror. I’m not sure how that’d work, as I’ve not got anything to make steam with, so perhaps, if you could, write your names? I’d like to know who you are, please. I’m not angry at you, or upset, because you’re awfully nice to live with, even if you do hide Sandor’s ph-”

 

Scribbling, scratching, and the pen, very slowly, rolls across the table.

 

“Could you write? That would be so kind of you. Thank you, by the way, for _Florian and Jonquil_. That’s my favourite. I don’t think you had the opera when you were alive, it was just a folk song, but the words haven’t changed at all. Are you from the Battle for the Dawn?”

 

Another movement from the pen, as if someone, very clumsy, tries to pick it up. Silently Beric holds it upright, as if to help, and then, suddenly, the implement is snatched, thrown across the room, hits Ramsay in the face.

 

Someone laughs, and it is not one of them. It is an unpleasant sensation of fingertips dipped in ice walking across flushed skin, nails digging, or scratches across chalkboards, or standing upon sharp gravel barefoot.

 

Sandor, unmoved until now, swears softly under his breath.

 

“Please, if we could do this without annoying Ramsay?” Retrieving the pen, fingers gentle against Bolton’s cheek for a split second - and does Ramsay lean into the touch, greedy and needy, before recoiling with a snarl? - Beric holds it over the paper once more.

 

Everything feels wrong. Wet, almost, and clammy, like a mould-spore and a damp-riddled building after fifty years of neglect. Thickness makes the air difficult to breathe, and she swallows, saliva overly gritty, heart rate increasing as they watch the pen being taken once more. Fear, thankfully, because Sansa could have fled from the room, but she is a Stark of Winterfell for a reason, gives way to a fascination, a longing to know. Knowledge is power. She needs to know her ghosts, her guests. Or, are she and Sandor the interlopers in this house?; the dead were here first.

 

Slowly, achingly, the pen presses against the white printer paper.

 

**_HOUND_ **

 

“What the fuck?”

 

Heavy capitals, horribly formed, slashing through the page into the next. Behind her, Sandor’s breath shudders from between his scarred lips, his grip at her waist tightening into something vice-like and deathish. Squirming, frightened, Sansa twists in the hold.

 

He’s grey. Ashen grey.

 

She reaches up, touches his face, thumb tracing across his scars. The ancient nickname, given cruelly and never used since King’s Landing, rips him still.

 

“How do they know? What the fucking hells?!”

 

“Sandor?”

 

Terror and anguish twists his face, muscles tensing. Fight or flight, when it comes to Sandor, always means bruised knuckles, and more scars, and anger that can only be lessened by beating it out on someone deserving, or a punchbag, or a wall. Only once has Sansa seen this before, and it involved fire. Only once has Sansa seen Sandor flee.

 

The pen, softer this time, easier, trails in cursive. Long sweeping lines, almost feminine but not quite.

 

**_My lady._ **

 

Ramsay, all of a sudden, giggles: a rimshot explosive sharpness that brings them back, with a thump, to the whitewashed room with the scent of the ocean in their nostrils. Sansa recoils from the expression that dances maliciously and makes her flesh crawl up into her body.

 

“Your faces. Oh, what else will our ghostly friends say? It’s almost as if they know us-”

 

“No, Ramsay.” Fingers, vice-strong, find Bolton’s shoulder. “Don’t. Just no. Not now, and not here.”

 

“What will they say about me, corpse?” The teasing slashes, razor-edged and vicious. “If they do know me? What will they spill, like guts, all over the living room floor?”   

 

“We should stop. Now.”

 

“No, let it play out. I want to see what the dead think. I want to know which of them they are. There’s so many. I don’t think it’s the wife, or her dog.” His glittering eyes strip Sansa almost naked, as if Bolton knows what she looks like without clothing. “Perhaps the other bastard? No, not bent over begging for cock from his fat little slut of a maester. The one who called her,“ nodding towards Sansa, “‘my lady’ was the huge blonde bitch-”

 

“Ramsay!”

 

“Be quiet, Beric.” Cheerful. His hand, square and pale, wraps almost casually around Dondarrion’s throat. The pressure seems light for Ramsay does not seem to squeeze, but bruising blossoms, purples and blacks, so very easily on that strong neck. Beric bears it, however, with a faint curve of his upper lip. As if, and it sickens Sansa even more, because she has been in that position in the past with - she hates thinking of Joffrey - he’s used to being hurt.

 

Everything stops, even the scuffle for the pen, for Bolton smiles so very dangerously. Gone are the whale-eyed nerves and almost fear, replaced by something darker and deeper and endlessly abyssal that turns his pale weird eyes glittering and amused and almost manic. Sansa finds herself behind Sandor, his big body between her and the two men painted in tableau before them. Black and white, and red and gold, frozen in time.

 

**_WHY HASNT SOMEONE KILLED HIM YET_ **

 

**_Sansa did. She wasn’t to know it would not work, was she?_ **

 

“Right. If someone doesn’t tell us what the fuck is going on, I’m going to go pissing medieval on all you cunts, so fucking talk before you’re picking your teeth of your arseholes.”

 

**_GODS I LOVE THE HOUND_ **

 

**_So does my Lady._ **

 

She watches him appraise the situation, eyes flicking from pen to Beric to Ramsay. As a barman in the student union, Sandor ended up as the bouncer most of the time given his sheer scale, inability to let people get beaten up, and who gives a shit attitude. If someone got smacked by Clegane, they usually deserved it. Professor Baelish tried to sue, but thankfully CCTV showed exactly why he ended up having to have surgery on his pulverised nose; Sandor has a copy of the incident on his phone that he thinks Sansa doesn’t know about, but he’s very wrong on that fact.

 

Remove the greatest threat.

 

Easily, sneer upon his mouth, he drives his fist into Ramsay’s leering pale face.

 

The man drops like a stone.

 

* * *

 

“Going to tell us what the fuck’s going on, Dondarrion?”

 

Beric looks older, and broken, and thoroughly exhausted. He’s put Ramsay on the kitchen table, all white and black and red with blood from his nose hastily wiped from around the slack lips and sharkish white teeth. Sansa almost feels sorry for Dondarrion, but finds what Sandor calls ‘her fucks’ very much lacking. He’s lied, he’s manipulated, he’s brought something into their home that invokes the spirits of the dead to talk to them so very angrily, and that isn’t the half of it. Not at all.

 

“You’ve got a very impressive punch on you, Sandor.”

 

“Stop. Fucking. Deflecting.”

 

“Fine. Let me wake Ramsay first? He knows more than I ever will. I think he knows who these people are, but-” He rubs lightly at the collar of bruising that sits under his jaw, livid and terrible.

 

“Tie him down, and you can.”

 

“Pardon?”

 

“The cunt’ll attack the moment he’s awake. I trust him less than I trust you. Tie him down.”

 

Dondarrion, unhappily, does as Sandor orders. He checks the tightness of the first rope, then seems to chuckle to himself, scrubs at his face, looks at them both with those odd yellow-golden eyes.

 

“I am sorry. For all of this. I hope that eventually you’ll see I had good reason to withhold truths from you, even if at the moment it seems as if we are the bad guys.”

 

Gently, Beric rubs a finger across Bolton’s bruising mouth, the very tip dipping between the disturbing lips and running along the teeth. He changes angle, winces, and doesn’t react as Ramsay’s eyes flicker open, rage-blazing and murderous.

 

“You’re restrained.”

 

“Fuck!”

 

When he pulls his hand back, Dondarrion’s finger leaks an oleaginous black ichor.

 

Sandor makes a noise that sounds like a hatchet scraping across granite, and, with a voice so hard that it creaks brittle and fractured, disinvites them from the house. It seems a formality, but Bolton twists uncomfortably, as if the words cause physical pain.

 

Good.

 

* * *

 

“Hello?” Her voice echoes, the living room empty but stuffed with an energy that Sansa cannot truly comprehend. Do ghosts trail ectoplasm? Is this what she can almost trace with her hands, this thick natured gloopiness that sits leaking within the croft? “I’m sorry to disturb you, but Ramsay refused to tell us anything. If I could ask you, would that be agreeable?”

 

Nothing occurs. Nothing at all.

 

Sansa pulls a chair from under the table, settles before the sheaf of printing paper, tries to relax her shoulders.

 

“I understand if you don’t want to. It’s been an awful day, and I’m sorry. I just wanted to talk with you, see if you did truly exist. Thank you for writing to me before. I very much appreciate the effort that it must have taken.”

 

Before her the pen, a cheap Biro picked up at a petrol station somewhere in the Neck on their move north and tastefully branded with the Martell Oil logo, skitters across the waxed table top. She catches it, and her breath, in one movement. Ice chills the plastic barrel uncomfortably, but she carefully holds the tool upright, over a clean page, and waits patiently.

 

She feels fingers before the pen is gently taken from her grasp. Large hands, and strong she knows, even though the words that paint blue across white are in that elegant almost feminine cursive.

 

**_I will write. I am quicker than you._ **

 

**_JUST BECAUSE YOU HAVE A FULL COMPLEMENT OF HANDS WENCH_ **

 

**_You’re awful at writing with your left hand._ **

 

**_IT ISNT AS IF I CAN HELP IT IS IT_ **

 

**_IT ISNT AS IF I HAVE BEEN ABLE TO PRACTICE_ **

 

**_CAN THE HOUND HIT THE BASTARD AGAIN BECAUSE I ENJOYED THAT PART A LOT_ **

 

“The Bastard? The Hound?” Sansa, nestled into the chair and wrapped in a blanket that she knitted, cannot stop watching the pen racing across paper. She’s brought more in case it is needed, for the ghosts seem to just be arguing. 

 

**_This might take some explaining._ **

 

**_GET BERIC TO DO IT IT ISNT AS IF HES ANY USE FOR ANYTHING ELSE APART FROM BEING A BOLTON LACKEY_ **

 

**_You like Beric._ **

 

**_APART FROM THE OBVIOUS DEAD THING_ **

 

**_We’re not supposed to talk about these things._ **

 

**_SHES A STARK SHE TALKS TO WOLVES SHE WILL UNDERSTAND IT IS IN HER BLOOD_ **

 

**_She isn’t our Stark, she is her own self, like her Clegane is his own self. We do not know if they are as they were before._ **

 

**_THEY ARE STILL GOOD TOGETHER IT REMINDS ME OF WHEN WE WERENT DEAD_ **

 

“Please can you tell me what you’re talking about?”

 

**_And Beric doesn’t know who we are, does he?_ **

 

**_THE BASTARD DOES SO SHE SHOULD FORCE HIM TO SPEAK OF WHAT HE KNOWS AS IT IS EASIER THAN WRITING_ **

 

**_Do you truly wish for Lady Sansa to speak once more with the Bastard? He refuses to answer her questions._ **

 

**_THE LAST TIME SHE SPOKE TO HIM HE DIED AND THAT WAS GREAT SO MAYBE YES I WANT HER TO TALK TO HIM_ **

 

“But Ramsay’s alive, and I’ve never killed anyone.” Head in hands, Sansa sighs. This makes no sense, poses more questions than she originally had.

 

**_I’m sorry, Lady Sansa, for being so cryptic. I promise that I shall explain._ **

 

**_THEN YOU AND THE HOUND CAN KILL THE BASTARD WHICH WILL BE-_ **

 

The pen is snatched away, leaving an angry gouge of blue ink across the page.

 

**_That is enough, Jaime!_ **

 

**_He has gone to sulk, my Lady. My apologies again._ **

 

“Please, I just want to know what’s happening.”

 

**_My name is Brienne._ **

 

The names. The names reverberate, and she straightens from her curled in nested form, hair spilling across her forehead. She’s heard those names in a thousand stories, in books and songs and on the television screen.

 

“Brienne the Warrior and the Kingslayer?”

 

**_He is still named Kingslayer? He will be amused and horrified in turn, my Lady. You know our names?_ **

 

“There are stories, and songs. They’re on the radio all the- that’s when Jaime plays with the tuning, isn’t it? It wasn’t that he wanted to annoy me while I was listening to my favourite music, but he wanted my attention, as if to say ‘this is me?’”

 

**_That is true. Before we were able to draw upon the Bastard’s energy, we could not manifest in any way apart from some small activities._ **

 

“What do you mean,” she asks, very carefully, “about your Sansa and your Sandor?”

 

**_My Lady, who I served until death, was Sansa Stark, Lady of Winterfell, Queen of Winter. Her sworn sword was I, my Lady. Her lover was the Hound, Sandor Clegane._ **

 

**_My Lady, do you believe in reincarnation?_ **

 

Sansa, wordless, wraps the blankets more tightly about herself. Chill though the room be, the cold she feels digs deeper, bone-scraping and muscle rending.

 

* * *

 

“So, summing up: the Bastard is dead, Lord Snow has gone south, and Lady Sansa is Queen in the North?” Two tall blond figures patrolled the outer perimeter of Winterfell’s snow-spattered blackened walls, furred and caped in pelts of brown and grey. Before them lay the wastes, endless, threatening, leagues of barren nothingness through The Gift, to the Wall itself. Even here, ostensibly far from the Others, the stiffening breeze sang of the coming of the unliving and the Long Night.

 

“The body of Lord Bolton has disappeared.” Brienne quirked the corner of her ripe-lipped mouth; a mirthlessness of a smile. “No one knows where it is.”

 

“Dogs probably ate it.”

 

“We can only hope that the legends of the Bolton family aren’t true.”

 

“Come now, wench. Do you really believe that-”

 

“Jaime.” Exasperation flickered in those blue eyes Lannister had grown, over months, years, to love. “Undead harry the Night’s Watch, and threaten to spill over the Wall. Benjen Stark does not live, yet does, with eldritch magicks I do not understand. He and little Lord Bran tell of the coming of the Others, and I believe them. No pulse beats in Benjen’s body, no blood runs in his veins. He is dead, Jaime, yet walks and speaks as if he is alive. The Queen of Meereen uses dragons, and your brother rides one of them, and still you do not think that perhaps some of the legends of the North may be true?”

 

“You read too many romance stories. At least with the Hound I can have a sensible conversation. Who would have thought that Clegane would end up as the most normal of you all? Anyhow, if the Bastard is what you suggest, then would he not be wandering about naked and with most of his flesh bitten off?”

 

She rounded upon him with a flurry of snow from her booted heels, nose blue-ish and sore in the half-light. For a moment Jaime thought she would strike him, Brienne’s mannish hand curling into a fist and rising before she brought herself back, remembered herself. At least when she strode away he could watch the flex of her leather-covered thighs, the tap-tap of Oathkeeper keeping rhythm at her hip with her long steps across crunching whiteness.

 

“Wench.”

 

“Leave me be.”

 

“You cannot be here alone, lest the Stark wargs come to dine upon your flesh.”

 

“This is not a joke! You have not seen-”

 

A sob tore her throat, her maille-hardened fists beating upon the walls of Winterfell. “You did not see, Jaime. Any of it. You were not here, and yet you do not even dare to want to understand! The Wildings do not lie, and neither does Benjen Stark, or Bran, or I. How can you even think we would try to deceive? Lord Snow goes south to talk with Daenerys Targaryen and your brother to ask for the help of the dragons. Do you know who Jon is, Jaime? You you even care? Dragons have three heads, and Winter has come, and yet you stand and mock me for telling you the truth! The battle for the Seven Kingdoms did not end with Cersei’s death. It has only just begun, and yet you stand there, you stubborn-headed mocking idiot, and do not believe what is in front of your face. You never have. You never saw Cersei for what she was until too late, or-”

 

“Brienne.” He caught her wrist, almost painfully tight. “Stop this.”

 

“What else will make you see? How else do you explain Lord Snow dying and living once more? Bran’s visions, that describe the past, the present, the future? How he saw you and Cersei, and how you-”

 

Memories prickled uncomfortably at the nape of his neck, of his hand about his twin sister’s long white throat. She was not Cersei, not by the time Jaime made it to King’s Landing, half-mad with the death of his youngest, sweetest son. She stood before him, hair cropped, black-clad, as mad as the King he once slayed to stop a terrible wildfire-driven taste for carnage. She, who was his love, his life, his everything, as broken as a man Jaime slaughtered to stop him doing what Cersei did instead.

 

Bran Stark, smiling strange and very quiet, took him aside the morning after Jaime came to Winterfell upon a lame and dying horse and without retinue, and told him, gently and without pity, that the deaths of mad rulers were not his fault. Softly the youth spoke: some men are destined to be heroes without recognition, reviled for their choices that save kingdoms from tearing themselves to pieces, or saving entire cities filled with innocents from falling to the obsessions of a madman. Noble intent is often murkier than the white-sweetness of purity and goodness. Sometimes it destroys the man who wields the sword, rightly, who is then seen as nothing but a murderer.

 

A Kingslayer, twice over.

 

“He told me she wore a gown of midnight, crow’s feather pauldrons upon her shoulders and the crown of the dead boy-king glimmering in her golden hair, and when I strangled her with my bare hand, the last words she said were the names of our children.”

 

Long muscled arms reached about him, Jaime pressing his frozen cheek to Brienne’s broad shoulder.

 

“I am sorry,” she murmured. “For the deaths of your children, and your sister.”

 

“I have very little left, Brienne.”

 

“You have Tyrion.” She kissed his forehead, the sweetest of benedictions. “You have me.”

 

* * *

 

“You fail me, once more.”

 

“My Lord Father-”

 

“If you wish to murder your sire, boy, at least do it correctly. A knife to the back is merely an inconvenience.”

 

“My apologies for not killing you properly. It shall not happen again. Next time, I shall aim for what remains of your heart, my Lord.”

 

“As you should. Now, what is to be done? Since we are apparently ‘dead’ we shall lie low for a while. For now. Until the Boltons rise again - we do, after all, Ramsay, rise again, do we not? It is what our kind do. At least we shall not have to indulge in this mummer’s farce against the Others. Allow the humans to get on with. Hopefully the Night’s King will slaughter the more tiresome ones before he is inevitably defeated. Yet again. The man has no head for tactics.”

 

“The Targaryen girl has dragons.”

 

“They always find some from somewhere, do they not? How tiresome. At least this is no longer our business, boy.”

 

* * *

 

“Where are we?”

 

“West of the Dreadfort.”

 

“It hurts, Jaime.” The naked need bled through the hoarse whisper, Brienne’s fingers white upon the raised pommel of the saddle.

 

“If you weren’t so stubborn, I would have insisted upon a wheelhouse-”

 

“I shall never,” and her teeth grit with it, “consent to ride in a wheelhouse like some delicate maid.”

 

Jaime watched her long and he watched her quietly. Sweat matted the pale hair upon her forehead, cheeks flushed even as the rest of her dear freckled face remained sickly, ashen. Brienne. Stubborn as an ox. She insisted the journey south, to Tarth and her father, would pass more quickly if they rode, but each muffled ring of steel-shod hoof beats in slush wore a little more at her resolve.

 

“You have to rest.” Jame always hated whining. He looked upon lesser men and mocked them as they pleaded - the golden lions of Lannister, beautiful cubs and grown beasts all, refused to capitulate unless amongst themselves, and then it was always Jaime who folded begged, desperate for Cersei’s attention as she drank and played at being wife and fucked others that she did not care for.

 

“Just a little further.” Breathing ragged, she managed the parody of a smile; ghastly in the sodden greyness.

 

Something rose from fog and gloom, silhouette hazy against the darkened backdrop of sea and sky.

 

“There’s a farmhouse. We shall stay there wench, and you will sleep.”

 

The finality in his words brought Brienne back a little, that teasing nickname that was once mocking and irritating lighting her gaze. Others call their loves sweetling, or darling, or a thousand soft tritenesses made for those who weren’t the hard-boned and athletic Maid of Tarth. Jaime called her his dearest once, sending them into paroxyms of giggling.

 

“My name-” At least she fought.

 

“Is Brienne.”

 

His heart bled with every moment, every jingle of harness and creak of leather, as they trudged the endless path towards the handsome building that lay at the junction of the wild moors and the crashing grey-tinged water. Desolate the place may be, but the stonework of the farmhouse - the croft, they called it, in the Northern dialect - stood tall and firm in the blast of storm and tide. A single gull cried, too mournful, too bleak, and, thank the Seven and the Old Gods, the door yielded to his thumb upon the latch.

 

Others stayed here before them. Someone carved their initials into the impressive granite mantel, another into the dark oak beaming that brushed their blond heads. What furniture remained seemed sound, and soon Brienne lay prone in a musty-blanketed bed. It eased the pressure upon her wound, allowed her a little peace from endless suffering that plagued her.

 

Idiotic, foolish, brilliant wench.

 

Perhaps they would write tales of the Kingslayer and the Maid of Tarth? Perhaps, hundreds of years from that very moment, memories of the Battle for the Dawn could still form part of the Westerosi consciousness, the psyche of a continent. The heroic sacrifice of Brienne the Warrior, and the Kingslayer who loved her.

 

“We will not reach Tarth, Jaime.”

 

“Of course we shall.” The false gaiety of his voice layered lie after lie.

 

She smiled then, exhausted, reaching for his hand. “I know it is bad. I know there is little time.”

 

“I will take you to Tarth, Brienne. Even if I have to drag you.”

 

“Oathkeeper is yours, once more.”

 

“I don’t want your bloody sword!”

 

“Carry it, and remember me, Jaime. Please.”

 

The prickling behind his eyes blurred his vision, turning her into a smear of paleness against roughspun wool. He would not cry, for Jaime never did. Not at the deaths of his children, or Cersei, or his father. Weeping, a pastime for women and callow youths, never appealed. And yet, as Brienne rubbed her thumb weakly at his knuckles, callous scraping, all he wanted to do was dissolve at her side.

 

“It would be difficult,” and his throat ached salt, “forgetting you, wench, given how enormous you are.”

 

Her expression impregnated his senses with her very being. “Will you lie with me? Will you stay?"

 

Of course. As if he would ever abandon her while breath still remained in her lungs. He stripped awkwardly without a squire to help unbuckle bracers, unlace armour, dropping metal and maille upon the oak-planked floor. Outside the storm finally broke, ice shards rattling leaded window glass, screaming Jaime’s grief to the roiling skies.

 

Brienne must not leave him. Too young, and too vital, and too good - how could someone like Brienne die? How could someone so honourable dare leave Jaime alone? Had he not lost enough, with his children, and his sister-lover, and now the woman who saved him from the chaos of his own madness?

 

“You’re cold,” she murmured, wincing as her arm slid about his bare waist. Never had they lain naked together; war did not afford love making in feather beds. Rushed coupling before skirmishes, borne of knowing that they could die in a moment. Frantic kisses after they returned, mostly safe, clinging together in dark corners while others drank to dull the horrors, or fucked to forget, or turned every inward and dreamed of blood and the dripping corpses of friend and foe.

 

“How does it feel?” He laid the scarred stump of his wrist lightly over layer upon layer of linen. “Stupid idiot question-”

 

“It takes a lot of effort to stay awake. But if I sleep-” Brienne’s beautiful blue eyes misted. “I’ll miss you if I sleep, Jaime.”

 

“Let us just lie quiet then, wench. You and I.” Carefully, avoiding her belly, he curled about her, cradling her against his pelvis, his chest. Even though she had two inches over him, Brienne always fitted so perfectly into the grooves and planes of his body - it seemed almost as if she belonged there, as if, somehow, her creator meant for their fingers to lace, their breathing to synchronise into soft, hypnotised delicacy. She smelled of leather, and sweat, and an acceptance that he fought to refuse.

 

“If I close my eyes, Jaime, I’m just resting.”

 

“I know, sweetheart.”

 

Those cracked lips, scuffed with chilblains, parted into a faintness of a grin. “Wench. I’m your wench.”

 

“Always was, always will be. Wench.”

 

Exhaustion took him, Jaime helpless to wage just one more war against the sleep that overwhelmed. The dreams that came fragmented, filled with greenish light; eyes the colour of sapphires, and two lost lion cubs adrift in a flame-filled desolation where dragons wheeled overhead. A wolf trailed the wyrms, gazing blood-filled and endless into the very depths of nothing. Reflections of what had been, and what will be. The black hound. The red wolf. The strange eerie wildfire echoes trembling throughout everything. The Others never surfaced, for they were nothing compared to the horrors committed by humans who ostensibly loved him. What terror could the Long Night bring when he once loved a woman who slaughtered a city, and his father tormented his beloved brother, and his sweet young children died so needlessly while his eldest deserved to be put from his misery with poisoned kindness?

 

He awoke hours later, heart hammering and sweat prickling unpleasantly at his forehead, because even then he knew.

 

Brienne lay so very peaceful and so very cold and so very dead in his loving arms.

 

* * *

 

He took Brienne to her father, and watched her be buried beside her long-dead brother, her long-dead mother, in the Tarth mausoleum.

 

Jaime kept his word. He kept her sword. He kept her honour and her name upon his tongue until the day he died.

 

When he awoke once more, incorporeal but there, the oak beams dripped moisture and the wooden floors skated thick with neglect and moss, and wide blue eyes softened as he found her once more.

 

“Why here?”

 

“I don’t know, Jaime. I’ve missed you so very much.”

 

They never really knew. Perhaps the emotional ties of death and grief in this croft gave them both a centred place of self? Perhaps, this being where he and Brienne last saw one another, this became one of those special places, thrumming with energy driven by nature and the North? Had they made the trek to Tarth and to the South, Jaime said one afternoon five hundred and seventy six years after he died, they may not have become whatever they became. The North, misunderstood in the wildness of her people and the depths of the magic that leached through rock and soil and into the very heart of the kingdom, allowed them this so-called life.

 

The North bred ghosts.

 

Perhaps the Gods - old and new - felt that particular embodiment of the Warrior deserved something more. Deserved to be at peace in death, when she could not be in life.

 

Brienne saved Sansa. She saved the Queen in the North, and the unborn child that lay quiet and unnoticed in her womb, and the Seven Kingdoms as she stood, armoured and alone, and faced the Night’s King. Oaths, for Brienne, could never be broken. She honoured her promise to Catelyn Stark, to her liege lord Sansa, and Brienne died for it.

 

She died for survival, and for the love of a soldier for her Lady, and as she crumpled with her belly slashed by his icy blade, Brienne twisted with a fluidity that belied her size and her mortal wound and thrust Oathkeeper through the Night King's long-dead heart.

 

Valyrian steel does kill Winter.

 

* * *

 

The gulls wheel upon the stiffening breeze, white-winged and black-backed above the spume and sodden sand of the shoreline. As the low dunes give way to scattered reed and grass, a peeling fence deliniates wildness from a semblance of taming; square-shouldered and squat, the Last Croft huddles between mountain and sea with the determination of a thousand years.

 

The woman, her red hair a pennant and her skirts flying, looks to the sky.

 

“Winter is coming.”

 

She catches a shadow, frowns.

 

“Will you ever wear a shirt?”

 

Her man, who seems half her height again and carries the markings of a life hard won upon his face and neck, scoffs. He moves with brutish strength, but the thick fingers that touch the woman’s high cheekbone are tender. His size masks a core that is not steel, or porcelain, or ivory, but red-flesh raw and more kindly than he’d care to admit. When unguarded, warmth flashes in his slate-grey eyes. It is always directed towards the one he wifed, and who he loves, without rhyme or reason.

 

“Not that cold.”

 

“You’re going blue.”

 

“What’s the point of being so fucking hairy if it can’t keep me warm?”

 

“Parts of you,” and her voice is tart apples laced with cinnamon, “will fall off. I don’t want my favourite part to fall off, Sandor.”

 

Eyes rolling, he allows her to scurry into the quietude of the cottage and reemerge with laden arms, wrap a thick knit blanket about his shoulders, press a steaming mug of tea laced with whisky into his hands. He allows the fuss with a rough-natured goodness, a hand cupping the back of her red-haired skull and stooping into a softly lingering kiss that deepens and grows into something primal and filthy, making the woman’s arms drop limply at her sides.

 

In a moment she is scooped up, squeaking, over his shoulder as if he is a Wilding reaver stealing his woman. In another heartbeat they are inside the lowering croft. Slamming the door shakes tiny particles of whitewash from the ancient walls.

 

Something seems to stir. Beyond the tiny leaded window panes that ripple in the oddest of ways, and diffuse the milky light into a prismatic chaos, a piece of paper sits idly upon a table. A pencil rolls lazily, before hovering over pristine whiteness; the angle suggests it is held by an invisible hand. There are other sheets of paper, neatly stacked, a jauntily fossilized rock holding them in place. The writing changes constantly between awkward capital lettering and prettier, softer flowing lines. Jagged and angular versus something carefully and lovingly created.

 

The soft graphite taps lightly upon the page, trails a line, doodles a sword, deigns to write.

 

**_HE DIDNT EVEN DROP THE TEA_ **

 

Outside the gale howls a banshee, but it is gentled with the softness of unheard laughter.

 

* * *

  



End file.
